Innovative Scrapbooking Ideas
Using your computer and a decent printer you can print your own scrapbooking additions and embellishments. With some glossy paper you can print additions to scrapbook pages that look good and are very inexpensive. With different types of paper and various images you can come up with a wide variety of additions to your favorite scrapbooking projects.
A word about copyright and images you download. You can use images and pictures you download from the internet for your personal use. You cannot sell them, this would be violating copyright laws.
To find embellishments on the internet to use in your scrapbooking projects, try this. If the subject of your photos has a hobby, type that hobby into a search engine of your internet browser. An internet browser is the program that you use to go onto the internet, like Internet Explorer. A search engine like google finds the most visited websites for the words you enter into the search line. I will use google as my example as it is one of the most widely used search engines.
Lets say you want to do some things with a hobby of someone, try fishing. Type fish into the search engine and use the image search. You will see a wide variety of fish pictures and things related to fish. If you see something you like, left click on the picture. It will load a new page with the picture and the google name in the top part of the page. At the side of this is a small sentence, see full-sized image, click on this. The image will load on a new page of your browser. To save the picture right click on it and a menu will appear, click on save picture as, and it will go to a box. Using the menu at the top navigate to a file that you want to save the picture at. The default when you right click on this is in your pictures folder, this is alright as long as you remember where you save things. You can use the small folder with the arrow to move upwards in the file tree to go to your documents folder and then to your desktop if you like.
Many times the name that comes up in the file name box is one you will not understand or remember, so it is smart to name it something that will make sense to you later. Leave the extension type alone, the .jpg, .bmp, or .gif, we will not be changing what type of file it is. This only has to do with things like changing the image and editing. We’ll deal with some of that later.
Search for several different things that have to do with what you want to add to your scrapbook page. Try some of these ideas using the fish theme and image search, fish stories, fish cartoon, fish ideas, fish drawing. You get the idea.
Using a hobby, favorite sport or other thing for your scrapbook page you can come up with whole new areas for pictures and images to use as embellishments.
Some other searches you may try to get some partial pages for a scrapbook. Try: patterns, quilt, wallpaper patterns, or fabric patterns. These will give you many patterned pictures that you can then print out on paper and use in your scrap book. You can print them out on regular paper or legal size if your printer allows this. But if it doesn’t, you can just print out regular sized ones and piece them together using different patterns on each side. You can use one pattern on one side and an embellishment to break up the two different patterns on the page. Be creative and search your imagination to use the various things you download.
When it comes time and you want to print some of the things you have collected, try altering the images some with various drawing and editing programs. Most computers come with some kind of drawing program that works with bmp images. There are several low cost programs that you can use to alter jpg and gif images. The different types of images you download, jpg, gif, & bmp are just how the picture or image was saved when it was added to the web. They have different properties and are for different uses but all you need to worry about is that whatever program you are trying to use to alter the pictures can import that picture.
Another area that you can search on the internet for new and different scrapbooking embellishments and ideas are free or trial programs that have clip art, images, and photo editing. These are available for free from several sites, just check out CNET’s download.com for some reliable, adware and spyware free programs. CNET is a technology and software review site that features free and trial software at their download.com site.
Something I would like to mention before you go searching for free clipart on the web for your own security. Be careful about the web sites you visit that have free clip art. Some of the websites that you find that have free products may contain spyware and adware. That is why I suggest going to CNET’s download.com. They are dedicated to providing free and trial programs that are free of adware and spyware. Just check out their home page at download.com for further information.
If you go to other sites that have free clipart be sure you have adequate protection for your computer for adware and spyware. You can also check out CNET’s suggestions for help with internet security.
Your imagination is the limit’s to what you can do with your scrapbooking and photo pages. Use anything you can think of and search the web for new and different ideas. Using a search, you can find many things that are not available in your favorite scrapbooking store. Try some things like programs for greeting cards and image editing. These usually contain clipart that you can print onto paper and cutout for your embellishments.
Try going to your favorite arts and crafts store’s website and search for ideas and pictures of things they have. Often the larger ones will have projects and ideas for free that you can try. For example, go to Michaels and go to their scrapbooking page. Not only do they have things for sale but you can use their items as ideas for your own embellishments. They have tips and techniques on their website to help you out. Other sites also have these so have fun surfing for new ideas.
Be creative and have fun.
